Before this week, I still thought of blockchain data as something more abstract than it probably needed to be.
I expected it to feel very different from the kinds of APIs and database reads I was already used to in Web2. But during the second week of 100 Days of Solana, that started to change. What made the difference was actually querying the data myself.
What started to feel familiar
The first shift came when I read a wallet balance directly from devnet. That did not feel as unfamiliar as I expected. It felt more like making a read call and getting back public state.
Fetching recent transactions made that idea clearer. Once I could see signatures, slots, timestamps, and statuses directly in the terminal, Solana started to feel less like a black box and more like a system I could inspect.
What surprised me most
What surprised me most was how consistent the pattern felt across different tasks. I used RPC calls to read balances, fetch transaction history, compare the same address across devnet and mainnet, and then render that data in a browser dashboard.
The tools changed, but the core flow stayed very similar: connect to an RPC endpoint, query public data, and display the result in a useful way.
That was the point where the “public database” framing started to feel real to me.
What changed in my mental model
The accounts-vs-databases comparison also helped a lot. My Web2 instincts still apply in some ways, but Solana accounts are not rows in private tables. They are public state objects on a shared ledger, with different rules around storage, ownership, and access.
If the first week helped me understand wallets and keypairs, the second week helped me understand that blockchain data is something I can query directly.
For me, that was the point where Solana started to feel less abstract and more like a real development environment.
